Blacksmythe

Today on Midday with Dan Rodrick I’ll be talking with William Julius Wilson who released a new book More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. Wilson’s work over the past thirty years has defined the discussion on poverty both in academic and in policy circles. Indeed it is not difficult to trace a straight line between the comments of Bill Cosby made several years ago now and Wilson’s work. Should be an interesting discussion. Please chime in.

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I was on the Marc Steiner Show talking about Obama’s first 100 days. In part because of this piece Marc thought I’d be more sympathetic to Obama than I was. But just because I froze my butt off seeing Obama get inaugurated doesn’t mean I’m willing to go all soft.

Obama’s already changed America both policy-wise and value wise. The creation of a Women’s Council within the White House all by itself is tremendous. But the decision to reverse Bush’s Freedom of Information Act policies, the decision to reverse Bush’s stance on abortion providers, the decision to reverse Bush’s stance on labor agreements, all help us in important ways. His decision to increase unemployment benefits and health care to those hit hard by the economy is important as well.

But with that said I give him mixed grades.

Why?

Because he’s black.

And I don’t mean “he’s black” as in “he should do more stuff for black people”. Even though he should in as much as blacks serve as the miners’ canary.

Chris Rock, riffing on the difference between blacks and n*ggas, gave the example of someone who bragged about how they take care of their kids.

Rock: “You’re SUPPOSED to take care of your kids, fool! You shouldn’t get any props for doing what you’re SUPPOSED to do.”

In this case being black means being able to perform under considerable pressure. With grace and style. Swagger even. The fact that he can run and chew gum at the same time–granted it’s a LOT more than this, but feel me–is something that we shouldn’t be astounded about. We knew this from jump.

When asked about Obama’s basketball game, Michael Jordan said that for someone who didn’t get paid to play for a living he was ok. But for Jordan the question was “can he go to his left?” “Can he finish with both hands?”

We’ve got to have the same high standards for Obama that we do for the things that we are willing to figuratively die for in the barbershop.

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If you’re connected to me via facebook you know I was updating furiously during the Obama speech. And I agreed with much of it. What he’s doing is nothing less than revolutionary–at least within the context of the last 10 plus years of American politics. The Great Society, the New Deal, Obama isn’t using a nice neat phrase to refer to his attempt to change the social contract, but this is what he’s doing. The GOP will attempt to maintain party discipline and serve as the party of obstruction–something the DNC should have done during the previous eight years–but i am not sure they’ll be able to hold up. States are coming close to the fiscal edge as we speak, and the numbers don’t even begin to tell the story.

Yet and still there was one element of Obama’s speech that I find troubling. He’s still holding on to the line about what parents need to do to ensure their kids educational success.

We’ve moved away from neoliberal policies. I’m expecting us to nationalize banks any day now. And whereas ten years ago we were gushing over CEO heroes, no one is looking to business or to MBA management practices to solve pressing social problems.

Neoliberalism is dead.

But yet and still we’re employing various rhetorical and institutional devices to frame issues in such a way that personal discipline and hustle remain central. We can have a kid write the President a letter telling him her school is basically crumbling around her….yet still emphasize “parental responsibility”, even as the kid sits next to the First Lady. This is neoliberal governmentality in a nutshell, creating a discourse in which people feel compelled to govern themselves, embedding neoliberal ideas about human capital deep within their souls.

I’ve never felt more connected to the country than I have this year. Seeing Obama handle the toughest crisis we’ve faced in the modern era with aplomb was powerful to see, particularly given his predecessor. But that’s part of the problem for me.

Neoliberalism is dead. Long live neoliberalism.

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With Obama’s election, there was hope that the black media corps would have a much tighter relationship with him. And to an extent they have so far–remember we’re barely a month into his Presidency. Feels a lot longer because Bush pretty much abdicated after the election, but still…

So Essence, BET, and Ebony I think have all had a crack at him. But still we hear “whining.”

From Roland Martin. From the black press corps in general. We need more blacks not only asking questions, but on the team figuring out who is even ALLOWED to ask questions.

Now I’ve already talked about this at the Barbershop. But a conversation at TNC’s spot has changed my mind. During the last administration, which was fairly diverse phenotypically, I argued that I could do without Bush’s diversity. If having someone black meant having someone like Clarence Thomas or someone like Rice in a position of power? Save that.

I don’t think that any longer.

There are at least two reasons why affirmative action, or programs that increase diversity “for diversity’s sake” are beneficial even when there are no substantive differences in the outlook between the various “diverse groups.”

The first is psychological. I don’t think I’ll ever forget my middle son’s response when I asked him why he was going to vote for Obama in the mock election:

Because white people need to know black people can do it too.

He understands at 8 what it takes years for some to understand–this isn’t about black self-esteem, at all. Whites need to routinely be exposed to non-whites (and women) in positions of power, regardless of attitudes, so their conception of power, their conception of (in this case) what it means to be American can change and grow. And we need to see this too, so our own conception of what our country is capable of can change. Note this has nothing to do with US. We routinely accomplish without the need for “role models.” 

But the second thing is material. In order to stave off societal death as long as possible, we need to have our cultural and human capital distributed as widely as possible. Having non-whites in positions of power and authority does that–regardless of the attitudes and policy stances those non-whites take. We cannot solve our current crisis if we continue to rely on a subset of our population for answers to our problems, just as we cannot hope to win any modern war if even 10% of the eligible population is sitting on the sidelines. 

Again, my own mind has changed here. I still have a strong preference for diversity that leads to a richer set of policy options/ideas. But I now have a preference for what some might call “surface diversity.”

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I’m prepping for class tomorrow. This semester I’m teaching Black Politics at the undergrad level and American Racial Politics at the graduate level.

Tomorrow’s ARP lecture is about the role of race and racial ideology in the generation of knowledge. I’m going to start by discussing why it took so long for political scientists to study racial politics, and then move to some of the problems associated with the modes they used to study racial politics when they began to study it.

But in re-reading the articles I came across the following passage that reminds me of a problematic exchange that I’ve seen regarding police brutality in black neighborhoods. In “Inequalities That Endure? Racial Ideology, American Politics, and The Peculiar Role of the Social Sciences” Lawrence Bobo begins with two post-9/11 focus groups, one predominantly white, the other black. Asking them each what is the most pressing problems they face in their community, the black focus group says “crime and drugs”. One of the participants goes on:

The first two robberies that I had, the elderly couple that lived next door to me, they called the police. I was at work when the first two robberies occurred. They called the police two or three times. The police never even showed up. When I came in from work, I had to go…file a police report. My neighbors went with me, and they had called the police several times and they never came. Now on that Sunday when I returned from church and caught him in my house, and teh guy that I caught in my house lives around the corer, he has a case history, he has been in trouble since doomsday. When I told [the police] I had knocked him unconscious, oh yeah, they were there in a hurry. Guns drawn. And I didn’t have a weapon except for the baseball bat, [and] I wound up face down on my living room floor, and they placed handcuffs on me.” (p. 15)

According to the article, the situation was so shaky that she thought she’d have been shot by the police had it not been for the presence of one black police officer. After this encounter she ended up being arrested, while the perp was taken to the hospital. 

One of my commenters, and others I’ve read elsewhere, mentioned the shibboleth of “black on black crime” when talking about Oscar Grant and other incidences of police brutality. I asked my commenter why exactly we should place violence between two civilians on the same conceptual level as that between individuals and the state? 

Got no answer. Don’t really expect one.

For the agnostic of my readers, re-read that passage above if you could. Crime is a problem in black communities because they tend to be poorer. But crime is also a problem in black communities because the individuals charged with protecting them are either slacking on the job, or unable to discern between criminals and non-criminals, or both. 

Which is the more pressing problem?

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Effective immediately, my university is freezing salaries, canceling all searches, and cutting budgets 10%. I’ve talked about this before, thinking that perhaps Obama needed to include the type of cultural creative work in his stimulus package that FDR included in the New Deal. But at least two others have taken up the call. 

This is an excellent moment to begin to think about what we’re preparing PhDs for. And what universities need to be. 

But first, calm.

I’ve already listed some of the things I think Obama should pursue.

What are some things we can do here?

For those of us currently training graduate students we should begin to have either formal or informal conversations with them about what the future holds, and we need to be realistic here. Even the top tier schools aren’t going to be able to place every single student who wants a job. Students need to understand this without simultaneously approaching their studies and their fellow students in a cutthroat manner. 

We should also take this opportunity to figure out how we can serve much more of a public role than what we currently play. The idea of being a “public intellectual” has fallen into disfavor largely because of the paychecks individuals like Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson routinely get speaking to “the public.” It’s become a marketing thing, used by some professors to augment their income and their presence/brand (in some cases significantly). Although I do believe that professors are going to have to do more work like this, I’m not talking about Dyson style public intellectual work but rather something different. Roland Fryer’s politics are not my own but he offers a potential model here.

Those are just two ideas. More?

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Adrienne Brown is hot like fire.

- We need ongoing supported focus on police brutality and accountability, even as we develop our own peace zones. It’s no longer sufficient to get furious when a civilian is killed by police, and maintain that fury until the officers are acquitted or resign. For the past 10 years it has been nearly impossible to get sustained support for this kind of work from the foundation world, so as organizers we have to sustain this work in other more community-based ways. I definitely want to shout out The Gathering, who have picked up this unpopular issue as it relates to juvenile justice, with the commitment of Harry Belafonte – they are joining the Oakland community for actions next week. I have also heard that Uhuru will be hosting a meeting tomorrow evening to discuss accountability and healing.

- we need to express our gratitude to groups like Community Justice Network for Youth (CJNY), who identified the gaping hole that exists in the non-profit and organizing community of Oakland in terms of police accountability work. CJNY stepped up in a major way for today’s nonviolent action, but they can’t maintain this effort on their own. Bay Area groups who focus their work on young people of color, this political moment needs you.

- And I know I am biased by the perspective of working at The Ruckus Society, but we need to engage in the deep training and skill development around pulling off large scale strategic direct actions. There are ways to pull together mass actions in a short time period that gain media, build the power of our positions, and help the community to see and understand the situation and how they can get involved.

More here. And here.

Over at ta-nahesi’s spot a group of folks have been questioning why black people don’t rail against black on black crime as much as they do against police crime. 

Maybe a year and some months ago, the then-outgoing Philadelphia Chief of Police asked that the organization 100 Black Men begin to police Philly streets, after a particularly vicious crime streak that left dozens of black youth murdered. The men were not to be paid, not to be armed, and only trained moderately. Some men jumped at the chance–black anti-crime rallies are the norm in black neighborhoods. This was my response. In a nutshell why should we put our lives on the line to do a job we pay taxes for, a service that we implicitly sign the social contract for?

I’ve got it–because in our case, the rights we have are not rights at all, but privileges that are given to us when we act right.

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Important tidbits in a growing story:

•  College endowments drop like a rock.
• In earlier news, NPR decides to drop News and Notes.
• Newspapers like the Detroit Free Press go virtual, while other newspapers won’t survive 2009.
• Book publishers have slashed their budgets. 

Now this may sound like a doom and gloom story. But it isn’t…necessarily. I choose these stories because they point to the growing reality that “cultural creatives” (writers, artists, musicians, intellectuals, journalists) like the institutions that sponsor them may need to rethink the way they work. With colleges and universities losing their endowments more and more graduate students will need to go outside of the academy for work. People on the tenure track will be placed in a much more tenuous position–assuming that tenure continues to exist. If the days of big advances are gone, then writers are going to have to figure out some other way to make ends meet.

And unlike the New Deal, when FDR created programs for artists…I’m not sure Obama has anything like this coming.

There are a whole set of conversations about the future of publishing, the future of the academy, the future of the music business. Black intellectuals haven’t been significant voices here.

We should be…because our futures are on the line as well, even as our future IS online. For me what I’ve had to realize over the past year is that the model with which we train graduate students, the model we pursue as assistant, associate, full professors, no longer works. And will NOT work. We need to be much more supple, much more entrepreneurial, and much more fluid in the types of questions we ask, the types of projects we undertake, the types of venues we pursue them in.

As an aside by the time you read this I should be on the road to Detroit, for a combination of pleasure (family), and business (collecting data for my next book project).

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Historians (rightly) rap Obama, arguing his stimulus package is weak.

As students of American history, we are heartened by your commitment to a jobs stimulus program inspired by the New Deal and aimed at helping “Main Street.” We firmly believe that such a strategy not only helps the greatest number in our communities but goes a long way toward correcting longstanding national problems.

For all our admiration of FDR’s reform efforts, we must also point out that the New Deal’s jobs initiative was overwhelmingly directed toward skilled male and mainly white workers. This was a mistake in the 1930s, and it would be a far greater mistake in the 21st century economy, when so many families depend on women’s wages and when our nation is even more racially diverse.

We all know that our country’s infrastructure is literally rusting away. But our social infrastructure is equally important to a vibrant economy and livable society, and it too is crumbling. Investment in education and jobs in health and care work shore up our national welfare as well as our current and future productivity. Revitalizing the economy will require better and more widespread access to education to foster creative approaches and popular participation in responding to the many challenges we face. 

More here. I haven’t chimed in on the Rick Warren deal, but taken in sum I’m reminded of something I first heard from my wife. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. But instead of sitting on the sidelines, do something. 

Again, thanks go to Buster.

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